Re: OT: Starcraft II and Elemental
 

I'm looking forward to Starcraft 2. I haven't bought my copy yet, but I'm on my 3rd copy of the original, so I'll be very happy with "more of the same" in the form of a good update.

Re: OT: Starcraft II and Elemental
 

Glad to hear you stumbled unto dominions. It has a steep learning curve and outdated gfx but it is a great game nonetheless. IMO it's the best FTBS currently available on the market. So, I encourage you to take the time to learn it and when ready join a newb MP game to get started playing it the way it's meant to.

EDIT: I forgot to say: Welcome :)

Re: OT: Starcraft II and Elemental
 

I have both as well. Starcraft itself didn't appeal to me very much simply because I'm more in favor of slower, more 'layback' strategy games like dominions, civ series and total war series, where you have time to think of strategies over the games where fast clicking skills are essential. It's just personal preference of course. I bought Starcraft 2 mostly on my friend's advice and didn't regret it. I suck at it, mind you, you can't change from slow clicker into fast clicker over night but the game is perfect example on how those fast strategy games can be really fun as well.

Elemental is a game I anticipated as soon as it was announced years ago. Needles to say I preordered it as well. It really is unpolished with lots of issues but it does have that something to it as well. That, just one more turn syndrome exists even in it's present state. It's a shame it came out this way to get trashed in the reviews but you can't change that anymore. I know that Stardock will work on that game hard and make it polished and great game that everyone expected it to be. Of course, everyone expected it to be such right from the release. :(

Re: OT: Starcraft II and Elemental
 

For what it's worth MOM was released full of bugs and got trashed in the early reviews as well :)

Re: OT: Starcraft II and Elemental
 

I picked up Elemental this weekend, and I have to say, it is fantastic. It is my dream come true...well, as far as games go. Buggy as hell and balance issues and such still, but I have faith in Stardock to fix that. I love it.

Re: OT: Starcraft II and Elemental
 

What do you love about it?

Re: OT: Starcraft II and Elemental
 

I'm a huge fan of nation building games. I never played MoM, but I have loved RotK, Genghis Khan, Civilization, And the Civ 4 mod, Fall from Heaven, which was inspired by MoM, GalCiv, And a billion Paradox games. This game has heroes, quest, city and nation building, wars, alliances, high fantasy good vs evil, and dynasties, along with magic. I'm playing it, and I get deep within it. I'm wondering if I should marry off my daughter to secure an alliance, there is a powerful ogre hovering on the edge of my Kingdom that is blocking my trade route I want to build, my son, the prince is leading an army to solve a quest to gain the spellbook of an ancient witch, and so on and so on. I just love the feel and play of the game.

Re: OT: Starcraft II and Elemental
 

The game definitely has future potential based on Stardocks record. The developers fooled everyone into the thinking Beta4 was completely different/improved from what's planned for release... they even fooled the CEO.

Anyone who purchases the game now will receive its first expansion for free. With the modding and solid updates from Stardock I expect the game to definitely be good after 9months. Besides we have to support the fantasy TBS games since they are so rare these days.

Re: OT: Starcraft II and Elemental
 

The AI is terrible, GalCIV II had really good AI though...and the game has bad balance issues and crashes all the time...the champions die pretty easy, especially as the game progresses. But I am still enjoying it a lot and have faith in Brad and Stardock to keep working on it.

Re: OT: Starcraft II and Elemental
 

That first line cracks me up - wow what an incentive. Anyone who falls for that deserves what they get.

I do agree with the last line - I like to support game developers, but there is a certain level of mutual trust / respect required. Releasing something in this shape blows that - I feel like a sucker with this game.

I wish someone who speaks Russian would tell the guys who make Eador (mentioned earlier in this thread) to get it translated to English - that looks like a game worthy of support.

Re: OT: Starcraft II and Elemental
 

Eador's author had an agreement, I think with Snowball/1C (big Russian localization company) and they were going to translate it. But there were no updates on translation status after that. Probably they think it won't give them enough to cover the expenses, I don't know. Actually the author said there was a group of people who tried to make fan-translation, but after professional guys from Snowball looked into their 2-month work they said that it's "crappy English" and discarded it.
So, some time ago I was thinking what can be done as the game really deserves to be known outside Russia, and on ag.ru forums we thought it could be possible to finish that crappy translation and give it to some native speaker so he can polish it in communication with original translators. So, if anyone here can help in that, I think we can contact the author about existing materials and see if they can be polished this way.

Re: OT: Starcraft II and Elemental
 

I'll add some numbers here to show the amount of work needed. The game contains text in 2 formats, .txt files that contain mostly text and .var files that contain game data in text format. Now, all the txt files are about 400K and the var files are 2.6M. For txt files, the amount to translate equals total size; for var files it's less, but there are 2 files dialog.var and campaign_dialog.var that contain mostly text and are 950K together. So the total amount to translate is around 1.5-2Mb, closer to 2.

Re: OT: Starcraft II and Elemental
 

I'd be willing to help if it is in basic enough form to clean up. I think I taught Zeldor English while playing Dominions! :)

Re: OT: Starcraft II and Elemental
 

For reference, according to this site that amounts to about 750-1000 pages.

To put that in context, Wiki Answers says that Tolkein's Lord of the Rings trilogy is 1008 pages.